Chapter at a Glance

The previous chapters covered a lot of the background information about Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In this chapter, you’ll start working with customer records. Accounts and contacts are two of the most important and frequently used types of records in the system. As you learned in Chapter 1, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and capturing the relationships between the accounts and contacts that work with your organization is one of the most valuable benefits of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM system.

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM, an account is a company or other business entity that interacts with your organization. If your business sells products and services to other businesses, accounts might represent your customers. Contacts in Microsoft Dynamics CRM represent specific individuals, who might or might not have a relationship with an account record. If your organization’s target customers include consumers, you’ll appreciate the fact that Microsoft Dynamics CRM lets you manage contact records without any association to specific account records. In addition to tracking customers, you might also want to track the other organizations and people that interact with your company, such as competitors, consultants, partners, suppliers, and vendors. This chapter will teach you how to distinguish between these different types of records.

You’ll also learn how to link contacts to accounts so that you can track how each person relates to different businesses. By capturing as much data as possible about accounts and contacts, you can begin to develop a 360-degree view of each person and business related to your organization. When you understand all of the interactions with each account and contact, you will be able to work more efficiently, make better decisions, and provide improved customer service.

For example, assume you’re a sales representative using Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and you want to approach an existing customer about purchasing an additional product from your company. Before you pick up the phone to call the customer, it would be ideal for you to know whether the customer is experiencing any problems or issues with the product she purchased from you last year. A happy customer without any service issues will be more likely to purchase from you than a customer who is experiencing a lot of problems. Now let’s assume that your customer service department is also using Microsoft Dynamics CRM and tracking all of the service requests in the same system you’re using to track sales and marketing activities. When you view the customer record in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you will be able to easily view all of your sales information and all of the customer service requests. If sales and service were using two different systems, you might have to make multiple phone calls or check in two different places to get the full picture of a customer’s dealings with your organization. Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows you to quickly review a customer record to understand the whole picture before you approach the customer about purchasing additional products or services.

In this chapter, you will create accounts and contacts within Microsoft Dynamics CRM and then work with them to track business relationships, attach related files, and share permissions for the customer data with another member of your sales team.

Important

Before you can use the practice files in this chapter, you need to install them from the book’s companion CD to their default location. See "Using the Companion CD" at the beginning of this book for more information.

Creating an Account

Accounts represent businesses or organizations in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You can access account information from the Sales, Marketing, and Service areas. The Account form consists of multiple tabs, each of which contains data fields known as attributes.

In all of the types of records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, required attributes are marked with a red asterisk (*) to the right of the field name. The red asterisk indicates that you must enter a value in that field before you can create or save the record. If you try to create or save a record in which a required field does not contain data, Microsoft Dynamics CRM will prompt you to enter data in the field, and it will not save your changes.

A blue plus (+) symbol to the right of a field’s name indicates that the field is recommended. You can still create or edit records without entering data in a recommended field.

In this exercise, you will create a new account record.

Note

BE SURE TO use the Windows Internet Explorer Web browser to navigate to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web site before beginning this exercise.

1. In the Sales area, click Accounts.

2. In the grid toolbar, click the New Account button to launch the New Account form.

   

   New Account

3. In the Account Name field, enter Sonoma Partners. If your system includes additional required fields (as indicated by the red asterisk), enter values into those fields as well.

4. In the Relationship Type list, select Supplier.

5. In the Street 1 field, enter 525 W. Monroe St.

6. In the City field, enter Chicago.

7. In the State/Province field, enter IL.

   

8. Click the Save button to create the account.

   

   Save

Tip

You can also create an account by clicking the New Record menu item in the application menu toolbar and selecting Account.